Hi,
Can you observe at her school to make sure she truly is thriving there? Sometimes the teachers are so good at being enthusiastic and saying what fun it all is that kids will feel it must be, despite it being a poor fit in some way for them.
Is it possible it's more than just wound up from school?
My DS6 was not a typical toddler. He was really pretty well behaved then. If we told him not to do X, well he wouldn't do it. At 2 I would take away a crayon if he used it other than on paper, and so he just never did again. We patted ourselves on our backs thinking we were great parents. He did cry a lot at 3 when disappointed about things, time being up or not getting to go back to X vacation spot the next day. It was not until 4 and 5 that he went through a big phase of testing limits and testing out acting angry, acting defiant etc. In retrospect a lot of it was self exploratory. It was a difficult time for our whole family and I think I made it worse initially by not being very consistent in how I dealt with it. Sometimes I'd be understanding and let him create a disaster and other times I'd lose patience.
Grinity on here I think it was, suggested the Transforming the Difficult Child Workbook. Which uses something called the nurtured heart approach (which one can google). This was really helpful for us. A lot of other books seemed like more quick fixes or vague or too "because I said so".
We didn't know where to start so started with the tactic of complimenting the little stuff, catching DS being good, "Thanks for closing the door". He would sometimes then open the door again on purpose, staring at us with a look of "well there, take that", just to see whether we'd take the bait. It was a real challenge for us. But it helped us realize how many rules he did follow unconsciously and that mostly he tried pretty hard.
And then eventually when DH and I were convinced that alone wasn't enough, which took a couple months, we wrote up a list of house rules that was very specific. And instituted a uniform system of timeout consequence for not following the rules that was as impartial and as emotion free as we could manage. I don't know if it was that or if it was just time passing and DS developing but he's has maybe needed a timeout a month lately. It was a long year getting there though.
When he is over tired, when he is sick, when it's the end of the week at school he is much more like the old difficult child than the new improved version.
That year brought DH and I closer together as parents as any time we felt like we were about to lose patience we would grab the other's hand and squeeze for support. Lots of handholding.
